Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9509010006
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
``After-Play'' opened at the Manhattan Theater Club for a limited run in January and was such a success it moved to the off-Broadway Theater Four in May.
Meara took the place of actress Rue McClanahan when she left after the original run to go into a revival of ``Harvey'' in England.
In ``After-Play,'' two witty couples are having dinner after seeing a Broadway show. The couples are longtime friends, one couple living in Southern California, the other in New York. They're strongly opinionated and their opinions differ, especially about the play they just saw.
The ebullient Meara didn't write a part for herself in ``After-Play.'' ``It was very freeing not to be in it,'' she says. ``I could have a glass of wine before the curtain goes up, which now I can't. I'm in it because the producers, kindly enough, wanted me.''
She had visualized her husband of 41 years, Jerry Stiller, playing one of the husbands. But he got cast in ``What's Wrong with This Picture?'', a Broadway play that didn't last long. He's also a regular, as the character George Costanza's father, on TV's ``Seinfeld.''
``A part of me always wanted to write, it seemed,'' Meara says. Ten years ago, she joined a group of actors, writers and directors called Writers Bloc. They gave each other assignments and acted out each other's efforts.
``There's always a little voice in the back of your head telling you you can't do something,'' Meara says. ``Psychologists can tell us why we're so willing to believe a negative before a positive. I don't know why.'' She found that with the encouragement she received in Writers Bloc, she could write.
``Jerry and I always wrote when we did sketches years ago,'' she says. ``When we started doing commercials for Blue Nun wine, we learned to write commercials.''
She and Lila Garrett co-wrote ``The Other Woman,'' a TV movie in 1983. ``After-Play'' is her second play, the first to be produced.
``It's about the things I've come to assess of myself in life,'' she says. ``If you're lucky enough to get older and put one foot in front of the other, there is an opportunity to look back and assess life.
``Everything in the play has happened one way or another. I have friends on both coasts. All the characters are myself, I would say, with versions of friends.''
The play also has a feeling of unreality. The audience senses that a near taxi accident on the way to a restaurant may have been a real accident and the two couples are dead. Meara says that is correct. ``In my mind they are in some sort of limbo. They walk into another life. They themselves aren't aware of it. I think they're in that wonderful last supper you get.''
There's a clue to the sense of unreality in the waiter's name, Raziel. Meara says, ``I was in Massachusetts and I went to an old library and looked in the Encyclopedia of Judaica and found the angel of mysteries - Raziel.
``I hope we have as nice a waiter as Raziel waiting for all of us.''
But the play doesn't deliver a message, Meara says. ``That would be pompous or pretentious of me. I hope people will get something from it that would be meaningful. If they get it only on the humor level, that's fine. I would like them to talk about it afterward. I would like them to enjoy and feel something.''
Meara had started writing another play when she was asked to join the cast of ``After-Play.'' ``I put it aside to rehearse this,'' she says. ``I can't do two things at once.''
As a comedy team, Stiller and Meara weren't rivals, she says. ``Now we work separately. We still get together to do Amalgamated Bank commercials. We've done our old act for an older audience.''
New commercials don't come along, she says. ``We're older. They go for younger. Cycles change.''
Stiller and Meara were introduced by mutual friends. On talk shows when they were starting out, he'd make a bizarre story of their meeting, she says. ``If you were on a variety show in those days and got to sit down with the host, your obligation was to be madcap and zany.''
Their comedy act grew from improvisational theater, the Compass in St. Louis, an offshoot of the Compass in Chicago. ``It was the first time I spoke directly to the audience,'' she says. ``I was pretty good. We started thinking of doing an act. It was really to take control and not wait for the phone to ring as actors. As I say in `After-Play,' it was to get rich and famous.''
Meara, 65, and Stiller, 67, have two children, Amy, 31, who does stand-up comedy, and Ben, 29, who acts and directs.
by CNB